The race for the U.S. presidency got a jolt of new energy Tuesday, with former President Donald Trump and his newly minted Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, showing no hesitation in disparaging each other as they hurtle toward the November poll.
Meanwhile in Washington, President Joe Biden quietly returned to the White House, after his recovery from COVID-19, to heightened expectations that he’d use his remaining time in office to achieve foreign policy goals.
Trump shifted quickly to attacking Harris after Biden, 81, dropped his reelection bid on Sunday under pressure from Democratic colleagues concerned about his frailty, mental acuity and falling poll numbers.
"Lyin' Kamala Harris destroys everything she touches!” Trump, 78, said on his Truth Social platform Tuesday. Earlier, he accused her of helping cover up Biden’s condition.
“The Democrats lied and misled the public about Crooked Joe Biden, and now we find he is a complete and total Cognitive and Physical ‘MESS,’” Trump said. “They also mislead [sic] the Republican Party, causing it to waste a great deal of time and money” on political advertising targeting a candidate, Biden, who is no longer Trump’s opponent.
Harris, a former courtroom prosecutor in California, the country’s most populous state, told a rally Tuesday that she knew the likes of Trump.
In late May, Trump was convicted of 34 felonies linked to a 2016 hush money payment he made just ahead of the election he won eight years ago. The money was paid to an adult film star to silence her claim – denied by Trump – that she had a one-night tryst with him a decade earlier.
Biden, who will finish the last six months of his term, wholeheartedly endorsed Harris, his second-in-command for the past 3½ years.
On Monday, he told Harris campaign workers, “The name has changed at the top of the ticket, but the mission hasn’t changed at all. And by the way, I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be out there on the campaign with her, with Kamala.”
“I’ve been honored and humbled — I mean this from the bottom of my heart, my word as a Biden — for all you’ve done for me and my family,” he said, while adding that now, “I’m hoping you’ll give every bit of your heart and soul that you gave to me to Kamala,” he said.
Biden said he would address the nation from the White House on Wednesday evening about his decision to withdraw from the presidential race and how he plans to govern during his remaining time in office. He is the first president since Lyndon Johnson in 1968 to withdraw from a reelection campaign.
While some Democratic officials initially thought Biden’s withdrawal might lead to a contested race among several contenders for the party’s presidential nomination, the most likely presidential aspirants quickly supported Harris’ candidacy.
By late Monday, Harris had amassed more than enough delegates to the party’s national convention, to be held August 19-22 in Chicago, to unofficially claim the nomination, although the party is holding a virtual ballot that will decide the contest even earlier, by August 7.
Former House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, still an influential Democratic strategist, endorsed Harris, as did actor George Clooney, a major Democratic fundraiser in Hollywood who two weeks ago wrote an opinion article in The New York Times calling for Biden to end his candidacy, even though Clooney in June helped stage a glitzy fundraiser for him.
The top two Democratic congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, endorsed Harris on Tuesday.
“Boy, are we enthusiastic. It’s a happy day. Democrats are moving forward more united than ever before” to support Harris, Schumer said.
The Harris campaign said it had raised more than $100 million from Sunday afternoon, when Biden ended his candidacy, through Monday evening.
Meanwhile, Harris is mulling whom to select as her running mate, with former Attorney General Eric Holder and Washington lawyer Dana Remus beginning to vet the backgrounds of several possible choices.
Among the names surfacing in news accounts were Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a former U.S. astronaut; and six state governors, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Roy Cooper of North Carolina.
Harris headed Tuesday to Milwaukee, in the political battleground state of Wisconsin, for her first campaign rally as the likely Democratic nominee.
Trump, after securing the Republican presidential nomination last week, is resuming his campaign on Wednesday with a rally in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, another contested state. Trump won the state four years ago against Biden, even as he lost the national election.
In Washington, Secretary of State Antony Blinken extolled Harris for being “a leading voice for American foreign policy and for our diplomacy.”
But he emphasized that Biden has a lot of work ahead of him even as Harris campaigns to take the reins.
“What he’s intensely focused on is the work that remains over these next six months to continue the efforts, the work that we’ve been doing, particularly trying to bring peace to the Middle East, ending the war in Gaza, putting that region on a better trajectory; continuing to deal as effectively as he has been with the ongoing aggression by Russia against Ukraine and making sure we continue to do everything we can to strengthen Ukraine; our engagement throughout the Indo-Pacific, where we have been building relationships and partnerships that are stronger than they’ve ever been, whether it’s with our allies – Japan, Korea, Australia, or New Zealand – whether it’s with countries like the Philippines and India, or whether it’s with emerging countries like Vietnam or Indonesia,” Blinken said.
Analysts agreed
“It's actually a fair percentage of his presidency still left, an eighth of this presidency is still left, and there continue to be real challenges, both at home in terms of lowering costs, in terms of protecting consumers from junk fees and protecting workers from terrible rules that benefit corporations and overseas,” said Navin Nayak, president and executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
“So trying to bring a cease-fire and peace in the Middle East, trying to continue to push back against Russia's war in Ukraine, I think the president is now squarely focused on those challenges and unburdened from the real rigors of having to also run a presidential campaign,” Nayak said.
And this situation also leaves foreign leaders in an interesting position, as Israel’s prime minister is learning this week as he prepares to meet with Biden, Harris and Trump.
Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “I do think Biden has one problem internationally, which is that foreign leaders know he's not going to be around after a few more months, and so they're going to be hesitant to make deals with him because they know that whoever comes next … and even if it is Harris, she is likely to have her own foreign policy team and her own set of aims.
“On the other hand, I think foreign leaders will want to accomplish things they can get accomplished quickly with Biden because they're not sure what will happen next,” Suri said.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct former President Donald Trump's age.
